K-ROD: Alex Rodriquez walks back to the dugout after strikeouts in his first and second (pictured) at-bats in last night's 4-3 Yankees victory Photo: N.Y. Post: Charles Wenzelberg

Alex Rodriguez (Anthony J Causi)

In a parallel universe, Joe Girardi could be you, a couple of Yankees tickets in your pocket last night, your son in tow, an evening of baseball at the big ballpark in The Bronx ahead of you.

In that parallel universe, Girardi, like you, maybe left the office a little earlier than usual so he could beat the traffic, get changed into his ballcap and his shorts, make sure there’s plenty of time for pregame hot dogs and Coke and maybe a cooling-off, welcome-to-the-weekend Bud.

Maybe then Girardi, like you, would look at your son, or your daughter, and wonder: What do I tell them about Alex Rodriguez? What do I tell them about how they should react when he steps to the plate for the first time? What do I tell them about how the other 50,000 or so will react when he steps to the plate?

Funny thing, though:

This is the universe we have. And Girardi does have a son, to whom he pitches batting practice every opportunity he can, who has grown up around baseball, who breathes it, who has a million questions a day about it. While Joe Girardi, manager, has a professional — and essential — relationship with Alex Rodriguez, his relationship with Dante Girardi dwarfs it. And it just so happens that whenever Dante Girardi takes BP from his old man, it is obvious whose stance he mimics: the man who wears No. 13 for the Yankees.

And there are things the father wonders.

“I talked about this with my son and how things have gone in baseball,” Girardi said yesterday, a few hours before the Yankees would host the Tigers at the Stadium, a few hours before Alex Rodriguez would receive the first of many audible referenda to come from his hometown fans.

“I’ve talked to him about how, in this day and age, with camera phones and everything that goes on, the chances of you ever getting away with anything aren’t very good anymore. And there are consequences for your actions and you are usually going to have to pay for them.”

There is more, of course. But you already know that. You’ve had the same conversations with your own kids.

“I talked to my son about the value of hard work and doing things the right way,” he said. “As far as my son as a fan I would tell him not to get wrapped up in what goes on in the stands. Be respectful and go from there. Because I think a lot of times the kids are going to imitate what your mom and dad do in a sense when you’re smaller.”

You suspect that all across the city and Long Island, up and down Jersey and Westchester and Connecticut, there were plenty of these talks occurring during car rides, on the subway, on the train. Even as the rain began to fall last night there were thousands of kids and thousands of parents, some of them wearing their 13 jerseys still, some of them still eager to welcome him back, some of them disillusioned beyond repair.

This is the hard part. Eventually, of course, we all learn the harshest lesson in sports, that no matter how much we may love them they don’t always love us back. The star pitcher is traded away. The All-Pro linebacker has a drug problem. The starting power forward has six children by five different women. The popular manager gets fired. The adored superstar gets old.

You want happy endings in sports, stick with Frank Merriwell books.

So eventually you have to talk about nights like this, predicaments like this. It isn’t always easy for the superstar anyway; Girardi told a story about a time in his career as a player when he lived a few blocks away from Michael Jordan in the Chicago suburbs.

“His yard was fenced and he had his own movie theater because it was easier for him to watch in there,” he said. “The time he handed out candy on Halloween through the fence the line was a mile long.” Girardi smiled. He was a pro athlete, a successful one, for many years. “That never happened to me,” he said.

When a superstar stumbles, the fall is louder, and longer, than for anyone else. And so there is the question of whether to boo, or to cheer, or to ignore, and the thinking behind it all, the debate, the counsel. Joe Girardi, manager, understands. Because he knows how Joe Girardi, father, feels.